[Deck] Trash For Welder

[mulletsss]

Hey there folks!
I've been thinking about developing a sort of budget-ish deck in legacy that could see some play and perform relatively well at a cost of being mono colored (aka with no dual lands).
Even tought I really like High Tide and Burn, I wanted to develop something around this amazing card that I am fascinated about: Phyrexian Dreadnought
My first try was with monoblue Stiflenought. I really liked the deck, and adding stuff like Delver of Secrets and True-Name Nemesis adds more "win-cons" (if you can name it like that) to the table.

But, as you all know, with cards like Abrut Decay, Assassin's trophy, Fatal Push and Isolate in Legacy, even with the backup of FoW and Dazes, things get really difficult sometimes (even worse when you get your big boy Surgical Extracted). And I thought that the monoblue was like an All-In version.
So I came up with this list. A mix of Phyrexian Dreadnought and the Goblin Welder mechanic. Trying to throw some curve balls at the legacy meta. Of course, things are under development (for example Torpor Orb cancels Goblin Engineer ETB ability), and I've tried a few different versions on Cockatrice, but still feel that something is missing.

That's why I am sharing with you guys, so I can get the help of this amazing community. The list is also sort of meta-based, to have some answers, so keep that in mind.
Enough with the talk, here is the list:

Creatures (21)
3x Ancient Stone Idol
2x Eater of Days
3x Goblin Engineer
4x Goblin Welder
2x Magus of the Moon
4x Phyrexian Dreadnought
3x Shield Sphere

Sorceries (10)
2x Cathartic Reunion
3x Faithless Looting
1x Fiery Confluence
4x Trash for Treasure

Instants (3)
3x Bolt

Artifacts (7)
3x Lotus Petal
4x Torpor Orb

Land (19)
3x Ancient Tomb
4x Great Furnace
4x Wooded Foothills
8x Mountain

SIDEBOARD
Creatures (6)
3x Copper Gnomes
3x Ingot Chewer

Instants (5)
1x Volcanic Fallout
2x Pyroblast
2x Red Elemental Blast

Artifacts (4)
4x Tormod's Crypt

Share what you think (even if you think this is total shit and waste of money). Any tips and comments will be appreciated.

[schweinefettmann]

To be honest, if you’re trying to cheat big fatties into play, why not sundering Titan (you’re mono red!), myr battlesphere and wurmcoil engine?

Push and decay proof at the least. And don’t requiretorpor orb to work.

Could try torpor orb as a sideboard trick vs dnt or something.


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[mulletsss]

To be honest, if you’re trying to cheat big fatties into play, why not sundering Titan (you’re mono red!), myr battlesphere and wurmcoil engine?

Push and decay proof at the least. And don’t requiretorpor orb to work.

Could try torpor orb as a sideboard trick vs dnt or something.


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Yeah, you have one point there.
My choice for those creatures was specifically because of Trample, Flying, etc to make sure that after all the engineer to "reanimate" the big creatures on the field, the damage hits my opponent.
But yeah, maybe orb on the SB, together with the Dreadnoughts. And add some more protection or lock on the mainboard, but still not sure of what. Thanks for the reply!

[kombatkiwi]

total shit and waste of money

Fundamentally the problem with this deck is that if you are trying to assemble a+b Welder combo with 2 cards that don't do anything by themselves (Torpor Orb + Dreadnought in this case) then why not do it with Painter / Grindstone, which lets you win instantly rather than just giving yourself a 12/12

And then rather than play cards like Stone Idol (basically un-castable and just a vanilla attacker) and Eater of Days (castable, but really bad without Torpor Orb) you can replace them with things like Wurmcoil Engine, Sundering Titan etc

Caleb Durward has a similar version of this deck he has played for a while, I would start from that.

If you are ok for this to be just a silly fun deck and you're 100% committed to playing Dreadnought then maybe you could also consider Sundial of the Infinite instead of Torpor Orb (you can end the turn with your Dreadnought trigger on the stack, and unlike Torpor Orb it doesn't disable Goblin Engineer).

[FTW]

Welder needs more Arcum's Astrolabe for value.

Astrolabe and Mox Opal enable off-color splashes for powerful cards like
Trinket Mage
Stifle
Entomb
Reanimate
Thoughtseize
Enlightened Tutor
Oko, Thief of Crowns
Dack Fayden
Daretti, Ingenius Iconoclast


Many options depending on how many colors you want to go and how budget you need to be.


Rakdos Welder


//Artifacts: 14
3 Mox Opal
4 Arcum's Astrolabe
4 Grindstone
3 Sundial of the Infinite

//Creatures: 17
4 Goblin Welder
3 Phyrexian Dreadnought
3 Goblin Engineer
4 Painter's Servant
1 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Sundering Titan
1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind

//Spells: 10
4 Pyroblast
4 Entomb
2 Reanimate

//Planeswalkers: 1
1 Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast

//Lands: 18
3 Ancient Tomb
4 Great Furnace
4 Bloodstained Mire
3 Prismatic Vista
3 Snow-Covered Mountain
1 Snow-Covered Swamp

//Sideboard: 15
3 Thoughtseize
3 Lightning Bolt
2 Red Elemental Blast
2 Tormod's Crypt
2 Sorcerous Spyglass
2 Plague Engineer
1 Platinum Angel


That gives you 7 Entomb effects + 9 Weld/Reanimate effects with some robot fatties or just combo pieces

Dreadnought + Sundial combo.

Painter's Stone combo because why not?

[mulletsss]

Those were extremely helpful and great replys.
I really enjoy the tips and can really see the benefits of going on another, more consistent route.
Thank you very much guys!

[Mr. Safety]

It's a cool deck! I'm not sure what your budget is, but I think some other cards to consider would be Sneak Attack and Blood Moon. Moon is not seeing a lot of play currently, so maybe it's a sideboard card, but some way to disrupt opponents will be really important. Sneak Attack is a way to get your threats into play while facing graveyard hate. I've always been a fan of Steel Hellkite as an artifact threat as well; you get an Engineered Explosives every turn and it's a mana-sink to speed up your clock.

Other cards to consider:

Platinum Angel
Platinum Emperion
Buried Ruin
Inventors' Fair
Daretti, Scrap Savant


Good luck!

[Fox]

There's a number of pre-loaded issues with Dreadnought + Welder, namely the color identity crisis (Welder is Red & colorless, Dreadnought is overwhelmingly blue). The Ancient Tomb stuff is not compatible with both strategies, particularly Dreadnought and Tomb (which means no Chalice; i.e. the best thing you can be doing with Sol Lands outside of SnT).

As @FTW points out, the very first thing you know will be in a Dreadnought/Welder list would be Astrolabe. Next you need a way to get [non-instantly suicidal, i.e. not-Dreadnought] artifacts into the yard, which is where a card like Lotus Petal is more correct than Opal. Other maindeck artifact effects to think about in this family are Tormod's, Soul-Guide Lantern, the Spellbomb family, etc. - you should be looking for 'win the game by itself vs unfair' types of effects as a 2-4 maindeck slot investment.

The hard part of Dreadnought decks isn't finding more pseudo-Dreadnoughts, it's doing something different and meaningful with the Dreadnought enabler. Adding slower cards (Eater of Daze), or just unplayables (Stone Idol), doesn't change the fact that Torpor Orb gets worse with every copy you draw. You're building up in a linear fashion upon an unsteady foundation (again, Torpor Orb). The same is true of Sundial. These are effects you need for Welder to recur Dreadnoughts from the yard ofc, but you're missing the best way to get them without ever risking flooding out: Karn.

Just like the Tormod's maindeck angle, you're attacking on a Karn axis - very importantly, you're saying "your Karn deck can't beat Karn, and my deck is the Karn deck that can beat Karn." It's critical to make forward progress (either Nought or Welder, both who want Karn in play) in the most crippling way possible to 'normal' decks. Note how you're also generating velocity while killing Chalice, which has the tendency to counter Welder and Nought, should that need ever arise.

You've now got this idea of Welder, Nought, Karn, minimal maindeck enablers, sideboard enablers, Astrolabe, and some potentially backbreaking maindeck sac-at-will fodder. You are feeling good against yard combo and anything that uses Karn +/- Chalice. You've got your value engine and some recursive loops which can overwhelm removal, and your topdecks are all working in the same direction which further impedes an opponent's removal - interchangeability of tools can also be called redundancy, which is a valid answer to "control" (Snapcaster/ETB value spamming isn't really control, but people like to call it that). If we stop right here, let's note that currently this list is not beating the card SnT, but you're looking pretty good against the rest of the format, particularly with the added threat of Torpor Orb's asymmetry.

This is the point where adding more red nonsense is really not going to help you against the primary build-order-loss to SnT; you need blue. Conveniently Dreadnought gets better in the presence of blue. Looking at the red options Painter/Grindstone is great as a deck that uses Tomb, but it doesn't have space to support Nought and the tools have nothing to do with eachother (inherent variance/drawing the wrong half of a deck is among the most efficient ways to lose to "control" over and over). Goblin Engineer is begging to lose to a SB yard hate card (and Red isn't exactly known for getting an enchantment like say...Leyline off the table), while also losing to your own effects [Torpor Orb]. You can ofc use Sundial instead of Torpor Orb, but you're no longer impeding an opponent's 'normal' legacy cards and you'd lose the line of Welding out Nought for Nought in response to removal on an opponent's turn. Goblin Engineer is far inferior to Transmute Artifact, which is blue (again, the color you need to begin thinking about beating SnT) and still a tutor vs yard hate, and doesn't walk into Surgical nearly as hard. Imagine turn 1 Astrolabe -> turn 2 Transmute, get Astro #2, draw a card -> please opponent, Surgical the Astrolabe...against a Karn deck...that still has one in play; sacrificing an artifact is *not* part of the cost of Transmute. It also maintains Entomb effect by not paying the difference, should there be no yard hate. The UU card is the better direction here, and it would be pretty suboptimal to have Ancient Tomb + perhaps Petal, into self-nuke all of your nonbasics into Mountains (Magus) as a turbo turn 1 opening play. Outside of Bolt, which does things with Karn [+1] - especially if you wished for a Liquimetal Coating, the entire red color isn't doing much. You've got sideboard REB effects, but Lavamancer isn't doing the right stuff, Dreadhorde is not at home, Pyromancer doesn't have prowess, and Chandra plus Karn is mono-red Chalice/Sol Land stuff (too high on the top end/you'll be dead by then). Bolt is your red card, and blue has better and faster [instant] and cheaper and bluer [FoW pitch] cards than red's lose-to-any-yardhate looting effects.

Time to fill in more slots b/c blue does what the deck needs: FoW, BS, Stifle - get the playsets in. Now you've got some game against SnT, and with a modal UU Entomb, your list just needs some Entomb'y targets that might happen to be in your hand in case some poor bastard decides to cast SnT. In a Painter list, you'd expect a card like Ensnaring Bridge to maybe be in hand, but this isn't really the card Dreadnought wants you to cast (even if you can Weld it out or Karn [+1] and Bolt it). The dump-in off SnT hoser, generally castable, Dreadnought-friendly artifact doesn't exist yet. This is a structural flaw you can't fix maindeck, so whatever you do is going to involve variance. A thing you might want would only be good vs SnT, which means you need to get to 4 mana, resolve a Karn, wish the hoser to hand (you're not going to cast it), and also not die to Sneak Attack this whole time (so you need blue to even think about being alive here). The not-ideal artifact card you're maindecking needs to win the most non-SnT games possible, so you're looking for power rather than [a currently impossible] harmony between Nought and Welder. Diversity of strategy is also going to drive this decision, which means it'll be Welder-skewed and preferably not play into every wrath spell ever (in the same way it can't just auto-lose to Strix/Ice-Fang). This is where experimentation is going to happen. No one is currently running these experiments.

In terms of left-over questions for your deck, you kinda have to not die to Goyf with that experiment slot. This is still a concept that kinda has to take over games when there isn't a Goyf. Also, this experimental concept can't fold to opposing Karn (since this deck still hasn't shown it can deal with an opposing one). Kind of a tall order being castable, not-creature, not reliant on activated abilities, beats Goyf, and less importantly can somehow maybe also beat an opposing Karn (technically not that hard if you can animate to a 3/3 to 5/5 size). Ensnaring Bridge was really close to being that card; it can butcher SnT and Depths

So here's the plan thus far: Dreadnought + Astrolabe = AstroNaught. AstroNaught + Moon (in the board) = the first man on the moon. Deck name: Neil Armstrong.

Dreadnought x4
Welder x4

FoW x4
Brainstorm x4
Stifle x4
Bolt x4 (some can be Izzet Charm if you want)
Astrolabe x4
Transmute Artifact x2
Torpor Orb x2 (not seeing any reason why this list is getting ahead by using a Sundial split)
Tormod's x1
Soul-Guide Lantern x1

Karn x3

Snow-Island x4
Snow-Mountain x1
Volc x1
Vista x4
Tarn x4
Wasteland x4

5 cards left...so uhh...something. A few slots of something sacrifice'y like Petal maybe? Rite of Undoing, I mean it can bounce a Lage and bouncing Astro is nice? [card]Tale's End[/cards] isn't the worst? Maybe there's an E-Bridge despite the issues? Azcanta isn't unreasonable, seems better than more lands? Saheeli, Sublime Artificer is slow, but Tarmo-foggy and combines Welder/Nought/Astro/Torpor synergy? Meekstone almost works? Something completely unreasonable for Welder (that auto-wins vs opponent SnT resolving, like Spine or Mind Slaver) + like 3x Chart a Course? Maybe there is a Fling cannon (I doubt it)? The 4th Wasteland could be Geier Reach Sanitarium if you're looking for more discard?

Lots of questions in this space until the ideal artifact is printed. Even if the missing piece is printed, most other Dreadnought variants should outperform. If you want to derp people out with red, it is probably more fun to abuse Sundial + Dreadnought + Planebound Accomplice w/ unreasonable walkers like uncounterable Chandra and Ugin at the high end. Bonus points for quintuple Stone Rain with Parallax Tide and Sundial (or Stifle).